Happy Saturday. Last Saturday's Classic mentioned the Boatload of Knowledge that was brought to New Harmony, Indiana to create its educational system, so we thought, why not go ahead and run our episode on that as a classic too. This one originally came out on August fifth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So if you listened to our recent episode on the New Harmony utopian societies, you may recall that we referenced a group of scientists and educators that were recruited for the second of those communities that was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge. And I have not been able to stop thinking about the Boatload of Knowledge, so much so that even though I've actually been working on research and writing for a completely different topic that I was planning to have us talk about this week, I moved over to reading about the boatloaders, and then I was like, uh, oh, so now it's just an episode about the boatload I'll get back to that other one and I'll have a head start on it. But I just you know, sometimes the brain obsesses over a thing. So for basic framing, just in case you did not listen to the live show that I just referenced. When Robert Owen founded his Owenite community in New Harmony in eighteen twenty five, and that was in Indiana, he wanted to have the best minds that he could find running the education system there, and for that he recruited William McClure, who also gave a substantial financial contribution to the community and also in turn brought many great minds with him, and the boat that brought them to the community was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge. We'll talk about how I got that nickname, and it's journey to New Harmony with pretty fascinating. So today we're kind of tying about things and maybe an odd order. We're going to talk about the boat load itself and its journey, and then we'll start talking about individual people, including getting into a little bit of detail on McClure, and we'll name a few of the other intellectuals that were involved in this trip and in this project, although they won't get as much detail. And then finally we're going to talk a little bit about how the school that they designed worked and what the group's legacy was. So the keelboat that carried all these luminarias of Intellect left from the harbor at Pittsburgh at two pm on December eighteen twenty five. There were just over forty people aboard, and that included a crew of eleven and the conveyance the Philanthropists that was with a T not a thch was eighty five feet long that's about twenty six meters by fourteen feet wide that's four point two meters, and the group was supposed to travel by steamer, but the Ohio River was too low at the time for a steamer to make the trip. The Philanthropist had four sections. The front area was for the crew, the next was for the men, the third was for the women, and the fourth was for the children. And they were all kind of set up like dormitory style, with like group living. This was definitely a downgrade from the original plan, and a lot of the passengers were pretty dismayed by these arrangements. Robert Dale Owen, the son of the Robert Owen who had catalyzed this whole project, wrote that quote, some of the ladies of our party appear already quite impatient and dissatisfied, the more so since they almost cannot do anything for themselves. He was worried that there would be an uprising, that the passengers would force the boat to turn around and go back to Philadelphia. Some were driven to the breaking point and they just cried openly. And this might sound really, really silly, but I want you to keep in mind that these people were expecting to participate in a well funded utopian experiment, and already at this point their first interaction with the project was well below expectations based on what they had been told that they could anticipate, So this probably shook their confidence in the whole thing. They were moving away from their homes to this new community, and it was from the onset completely not what they had been told to expect. But once everyone got used to these alternate, sort of last minute arrangements on the keel boat, which were going to be their home for a month and a half that it took to make the journeyal that they didn't know it would be quite that long. They did settle in, and by most reports, they even managed to have quite a bit of fun. Just a few days into the trip, though the philanthropist ran aground. That happened just sixteen miles down the Ohio. They could not get the boat free. And coincidentally, this happened just seven miles away from Economy, Pennsylvania, and that was the new town that had been established by the Rapite community that had built New Harmony. Initially, McClure, owen Son and the two other men made the track on land to ask if the rat Bites could help them. Six men were sent out from Economy. They managed to get the boat free. And what's even funnier is that in Robert Dale Owen's assessment of these rescuers, he didn't find them to be particularly smart or engaging, which is odd given their great success at the very type of endeavor that he and his father were trying to do, although they were also achieving commercial success. Yeah, he was like, oh, they were kind of stupid and not very entertaining, But I just I want to this is another time where I want the time travel machine so I can go back and shake him and go dude. They built a successful communal living experiment, they just moved on to another PLACESE. You haven't proven yourself yet, Champion, maybe don't be so judgy. So the day after the keel boat was shifted into a better position, the passengers visited Economy. They had been invited to spend the day there at the invitation of Rapite leader George Rapp, and they seem to have had a really lovely time. This was the last time that Robert Owen, the one who started this whole new community, spent with the boat passengers. He left from Economy to travel to Pittsburgh on business. He had some final arrangements to make in terms of the legalities of taking over the land, and he left the science and educators, along with his son Robert Dale, on their own for the rest of the journey. They didn't get very far though. As they reached the station called Safe Harbor, which was just about eight miles from where they had run aground, they got iced in. The philanthropists stayed there, stuck on ice for four full weeks. The group didn't extricate the boat until January ninth, which was twenty eight days after they had been first iced in, and during that time there had been just a number of misfortunes, including people who fell through the ice but survived. One passenger who fell and hit his head on a log while out hunting, which caused a delirium and fever. He eventually did recover, though there were also a number of people who opted to leave the boat and shelter elsewhere or travel over land before ultimately regrouping with everyone else. Yeah. I when I was first researching this and they were saying, like, some people just left the boat, I was like, uh oh, but they all managed to hook back up with everybody. They didn't just wander out into the snowy wilderness and perish or meets some bad end. This whole thing comes off as kind of comical because this is a boat full of smart people that keeps running into problems, But it's more of an indication of how difficult travel was. I feel like it was like the the micro cosm version of how their entire commune played out, because it just wasn't planned as well as it should have been, right, and they didn't know enough about traveling by boat down a river, yeah, to know. Like there are some of their writings where they're like, we don't know if the captain is bad at his job or if it's just really bad situations, And it's like they just had no idea what they were doing well, and it's just the wrong time to be taking a steamer down a river that freezes over well, and they didn't even have a steamer. They're in a keelboat. Like okay, a steamer may have wiggled through, but the keelboat was like no, ma'am. While they were ice bound, though, some passengers sketched and played games, and they explored the river banks, they had assessed their situation and agreed that to make everything work, they were just going to eat two meals a day, both to stretch their supplies and to prevent someone from having to take on the load of making three meals a day. While they were in this odd situation, they also organized themselves to be able to relieve eight of the crew members on a rotating schedule. They traveled by land eight miles south to the town of Beaver from time to time to get some supplies and socialize. On one of these occasions, Robert Dale Owen got into a discussion with a Methodist minister, who, he wrote quote reasoned with quite good temper and some talent, but has the most incorrect ideas. Robert Dale Owen, like his father believed that religion was more of a problem than a source of good. Yeah, the Owenites whole thing was that religion was useless and that you just needed to raise people right to make a better world with good education. But yeah, it's sort of one of those every time I'm reading anything that Robert Dale Owen writes, just like he talked about the Rappites being like not very smart or interesting, I'm like, you are not. You seem like a person whose intentions are good and makes a lot of foolish judge hits. The group also incidentally took on several additional passengers just a few days before they were able to move on from the ice, and when the ice started to break, the sound of it scared them all so much that they were convinced that the boat was sinking again, kind of evidence that they maybe weren't fully prepared for this trip. But after they evacuated and carted all of their trunks and luggage ashore, they realized things that were okay and even good because that meant the ice was breaking up, and then they had to haul everything back onto the boat and make preparations to get underway. To that end, they also cut a pathway in the remaining ice to get the keel boat moving, and they were soon once again headed to their new utopia. They made a stop that first evening in Steubenville, Ohio, and took on another passenger, which was the son of Judge Benjamin Tappan, who wanted to have his child educated in New Harmony. They stopped in other towns along the way, most notably Cincinnati, where several of the boat loaders toured the Museum of Natural History. When they got to Louisville, Kentucky, they once again grew in numbers as Joseph Neefe, who was an educational reformer, joined up with them along with his wife, and after Louisville, the Philanthropists made its way to Mount Vernon, Indiana, and there they made land to start the final leg of the journey. So most of them at that point traveled the final fifteen miles to New Harmony by wagon, arriving on January twenty third, and at that point they had been in transit for forty seven days. A small handful of them, however, remained on the keel boat and they traveled farther south on the Ohio before linking up with the Wabash River and turning north into it to make their way to New Harmony. So the origin for the nickname Boatload of Knowledge came from a speech by Robert Owen. While the keel boat that the scientists and educators were on made its way down the Ohio River, Owen had traveled ahead by land, and he started telling the New Harmony residents who were setting up their new utopia about McClure's really fantastic group. He gave a speech to this new community in which he commented on the vast amount of knowledge that was contained in this one boat continuing quote, not Latin and Greek and other languages, but real substantial knowledge. From that point, people started calling the philanthropist the boatload of Knowledge. I love that nickname so much. Owen had called the educators aboard quote, some of the ablest instructors of use that could be found in the US or perhaps the world, And all of that knowledge and ability had been gathered by a man named William McClure, who is often called Owen's partner in his utopian enterprise. We'll get into McClure's life after we pause for a quick sponsor break William McClure was born on October twenty seventh, seventeen sixty three in Ayr, Scotland. His father was a merchant and was successful enough that William got a private education. William first traveled to the US at the age of nineteen, and after a brief stay, he went to London, where he started a job with Miller Hart and Company, an American commerce firm, and while working there he was constantly traveling, mostly to France and Ireland, but also on occasion to the US. In seventeen ninety six, McClure moved to the United States, permanently settling in Philadelphia. He also became a US citizen. He was already wealthy, but he quickly started adding to his fortune with business interests in Pennsylvania and Virginia. By eighteen hundred, he was able to leave work behind and focus on his other interests, which were science and education reform, full time, and he felt that the way that education had been managed up to that point was catastrophic, writing quote, I had been long in the habit of considering education one of the greatest abuses our species were guilty of, and of course one of the reforms most beneficial to humanity. He saw that society was generally separated in categories of non productive and productive classes, governors and the governed, and that the only real thing that kept the system in place was the education that the upper classes were receiving. So he wanted to buck against that age's old arrangement and offer equal knowledge to rich and poor. He believed that once someone was armed with knowledge, they could rise up, so the lower classes, if they had education, could meet the upper class in equality. He also saw that the young Republic of the United States needed an educated populace if it was going to survive. He wrote quote power being in the hands of the people through the medium of popular governments renders a diffusion of knowledge necess to the support of freedom. He looked to the work of Swiss education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestilazzi, who had built a curriculum plan based on the ideas in Jean Jacqesrusseau's Emil, which examined the individual in society and the relationship between the two. McClure visited Pestilazzi's school several times to observe and it was that model that he sought to emulate when he planned out New Harmony's education system. McClure had tried to convince Pestilazzi to move to the US, and even offered to bankroll a new school for him, but Pestilazzi turned that offered down. And even as McClure was studying and promoting the latest ideas in education reform, he was also engaged in his own scientific work, specifically in geology. In eighteen oh nine, he offered up a geological map of the United States to the American Philosophical Society during a lecture, and this is considered to be a breakthrough moment in geology. He had put together data that no one else had assembled, and as his fame for his scientific work grew, McClure started to spend his time bouncing from geological tours and surveys to meeting with education experts and setting up schools. Because he made a name for himself in the geological sciences, when the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was formed in eighteen twelve, McClure was invited to become a member. In eighteen seventeen, he became the organization's president, which was a post he would hold for more than two decades right up till the end of his life, and it was the connections that he made through that organization that really enabled him to assemble an academic dream team for New Harmony. There was an Owenite society in Philadelphia by eighteen twenty three, a year before Robert Owen bought New Harmony. He made that purchase at the end of eighteen twenty four, and members of the Academy of Natural Sciences had read Owen's essays on communal living as early as the eighteen teens and they were pretty enthralled by his ideas because it was exciting and new, and some, including McClure, had even visited Owen's community in New Lanark, Scotland, where Owen had focused on improving the conditions for the poor working class that kept his textile mills running. And eventually it was McClure that Robert Owen entrusted to design and establish the education system and bo New Harmony Indiana. One of the people that McClure worked with closely to get New Harmony's children educated was Maria ducros Fletagiaux, and she was born in France in seventeen eighty three and had married Joseph Fletageaux as a young woman, although the exact date of their marriage is unknown. The couple had a child named Achilles, a son, but they lived separately, so her husband Joseph does not seem to have factored very prominently in her life at all. Marie's first contact with William McClure took place in eighteen nineteen when he was visiting Paris. Fretijeaux moved from Paris to Philadelphia in eighteen twenty one to set up a Pestiluzian school. She helped spread Owen's ideas when she came to North America. She brought some essays that had been published in Europe and started circulating that and discussing it with other members of the Philadelphia science and education communities. Yeah, in a lot of ways, she really seeded some of these ideas that Owens had had by just she was very charming and people really took a shine to her generally, and so when she was like, I have this exciting essay that I want you to read, people read it. It appears that it was actually Freda Joe that convinced McClure that he should partner with Owen. Although McClure had written to her after he first visited New Lanark and he spoke of his time there as the most pleasant of his life, it was her urging that really amplified his interest in his desire to invest in the New Harmony project and to recruit like minded intellectuals to their cause. She met Robert Owen in November of eighteen twenty four when he visited Philadelphia and specifically her school. She later wrote McClure that she and Owen had immediately hit it off. They were like old friends from the moment they met. Owen told her that if they worked on their education ideas in a place where the various obstacles to those ideas could be removed, a community like the one he was planning, they could truly see what a proper education could do for a child's development. He went on to make the case to Fretajou that she could keep working at her school in Philadelphia for decades, but she would never really get to see just how impactful her work could be there. But if she came to New Harmony, things would be different because she could work without societal ills of a large city, ruining and countering her efforts. Coming up will do a quick rundown a few of the other people who put so much work into setting up the education system in New Harmony. But first we'll have a quick sponsor break. While Marie Fretajeaux was a cornerstone of the education system in New Harmony and one of the most important members after Robert Owen and William McClure, there were, of course plenty of others that came on that boatload of knowledge, and here are but a few of them. Thomas Say was born on June twenty seventh, seventeen eighty seven. He was an entomologist and a concologist, and someone who McClure had befriended early on in his time at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Say was the librarian there. McClure had funded some of Say's scientific research trips and then asked Say to accompany him on several of his geological surveys. Say is often called the father of American descriptive entomology. If you google him you can find lots of stuff from his entomology work. Yeah, and just in case you don't know what a concologist is. It's someone who studies mollusk shells, and he had expertise in this field. He was one of the leaders in that area. So when the boatload of knowledge was trapped in the ice and the passengers started covering shifts to relieve the crew, it was Say that everyone elected as captain, and he was apparently really pretty good at managing the crew. In eighteen twenty seven, Say married one of the students that Marie Fretegieaux had brought with her on the trip. Once the school system of New Harmony was established, it to say that McClure entrusted with it whenever he was away from the village. Later on, when the utopian experiment had ended, Say stayed at New Harmony. He used that as his primary location from which he conducted his research, and he wrote for the rest of his life that life, unfortunately was pretty short. He died in eighteen thirty four. French naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesieur born in seventeen seventy eight was another friend from the Academy of Natural Sciences and in his work in paleontology, archaeology, ixeology, and general zoology. Lesieur made numerous discoveries of new species while he traveled the world, particularly Australia, and he served as curator at the Academy. Like Marie Fretejeaux, Lesur had been into Owen's idea of a utopian society even before McClure, and was eager when the chance came along to be part of New Harmony. During the boat ride down the Ohio River, he drew one hundred and twenty seven sketches of the landscapes that they traveled through. Yeah, those are, you know, kind of the visual record of that entire trip, and they're really interesting. He was a really, really talented artist, and while Robert Owen, who founded the second Utopia New Harmony, left feeling as though McClure's curriculum had been part of its demise, he recognized Lysier's art skills so much that he still sent one of his sons, Richard, back to New Harmony to study with Lysier. In eighteen twenty eight, after Thomas Say died, Lasour returned to France and he went on to become the curator at the Muse Distois Natuelle d Have. Although he served in that prestigious position for less than a year before he also died in December of eighteen forty six. Williams. Fiquipal d'arrousement was like Fretagioux, an educator, and when he traveled in New Harmony, he actually brought ten students with him. They were boys from a school that he taught at in Philadelphia. That school had been established by William McClure, and before working there, Fiquipal had worked in schools in France which had also been funded and established by McClure. Fiquipal was the person, incidentally, who had hit his head on a log during that ic in on the river and seemed to be in pretty bad shape for a while. Two of his students were the first to fall through the ice as well, so that month they were stuck there. Was just not particularly kind to him. Yeah. He also kind of had a reputation for being a little bit of a grouchil Epithecus. There were some people that claimed that he never fully recovered and that was why he was so grumpy. Once the system at New Harmony was in place, Fickopaul taught, among other things, printing. He left the school in eighteen thirty and in eighteen thirty one, he married social reformer France's Right. That marriage ended in divorce in eighteen fifty. So that's just a sampling of these educators and to kind of move on to the curriculum and the legacy of these schools. Though Owen's New Harmony experiment ended just two years after it began, as we mentioned in our previous episode on the subject, the educators stayed around. They kept the school system going. They also started publishing a regular journal called The Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, which continued publication until they eighteen forties. Yeah, they really felt like they had built something worthwhile and they weren't willing to just abandon it just because the utopian society wasn't going to work out, and they had people that wanted to send their children there. The curriculum for New Harmony children started when they were still toddlers. So children enrolled in the first school, called the Infant School at the age of two, and at that point it's obviously just about play, and the educators were kind of noting the development of the children, and children stayed in Infant School until they were five years old. At age five, children moved into the Higher School. They also boarded away from their families in a large dormitory. This was intended to keep the educational plan free from parental influence and also to introduce the children to the idea of communal living from a very early age. The Higher School educated children until they were twelve and included trades training in workshops and textile mills so that they were contributing to the good of society from early on. Their academic work included courses in mathematics, mechanics, art, music, language, science, and writing, with jim nastics for physical exercise. Throughout the lessons of the Higher School, all the scientists that had been recruited gave lectures. Yeah, it was basically like having teachers who were the Krem de la Crem and all of their fields come and give talks periodically. That aspect of it is really unique and quite special. After completing the Higher School, students would move on to the School of Industry, and that's where real trade instruction took place, and there students learned a great deal more than that early training that they had gotten in the Higher School. So this training did separate pretty solidly though along gender line. So the boys learned everything from taxidermy to blacksmithing, and the girls were taught dressmaking, millinery, cooking, and other domestic skills. The School of Industry also ran its own printing press. That was part of why Fukuopaul was teaching how to run the press and students were taught to run it so that the scholars of the town could have their own publishing mechanism for their research, which I have to say is a pretty ingenious setup. Although McClure's educational system shuddered after his death, the programs that he and his colleagues instituted were precursors to the public school system and paved the way for it, even though it would be decades before such a system was actually in place in Indiana. That effort was helped along in eighteen fifty one by Robert Dale Owen, who became very active in government and public affairs. That year he helped get language providing for a tax supported, free public education system written into Indiana's Second Constitution. And the scholars and scientists of New Harmony had assembled a library that was worthy of any university's envy. They had brought their book collections with them as they traveled and all kind of merged those together into one library and their collections of specimens in their museum that they set up drew researchers from around the world who wanted to observe them, as well as meet with the scientists there to discuss their ideas and kind of use them as like a sounding board for things that they were working on. In eighteen twenty eight, year after Owen's New Harmony experiment was dissolved, William McClure left as well. He headed to Mexico. Over the next five years, he and Marie Fretajeaux exchanged almost five hundred letters in which it became clear that the French teacher had fallen really in love with the geologist. That didn't appear that McClure returned her romantic interests, though, but the two of them did remain close. Fretejoue traveled to Mexico to visit McLure in eighteen thirty three and died not long after arriving. McClure stayed in Mexico until the end of his life in eighteen forty. Throughout all this time in New Harmony in Mexico, he had remained president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is one of those things. McClure constantly on the road from the time he was young, so he might have just been good at managing affairs he was not physically involved in, but he had, you know, kept things going at the school even though he was in another country. He was, you know, giving his input on curriculum. He was kind of keeping it running in a lot of ways, and financially he was still willing to put a lot of backing into it. When he died, McLure left behind two different educational funds. One was part of the Academy of Sciences and that was clearly described as funding that should go to making sure educational materials went into the hands of laborers. The other had the same goal, but it was a general provision in his will that offered five hundred dollars to any laborer's group that established a lecture and reading room with at least one hundred books in it. There were one hundred and sixty libraries that were funded as a result of this provision. That practice of making knowledge accessible for everyone was something that McClure had put into practice himself. Throughout his life, but one of the most enduring examples of it is the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute, which he founded in eighteen thirty eight, which was two years before he died. The institute moved from its original location in the church at New Harmony to a new building in eighteen ninety four and it remains in operation to this day. Now it's the oldest continuously operating public library in Indiana. Yeah, it's also a museum. And even though it is called the Workingmen's instat it was always intended to be something that not just men could access, but their entire families would have access to any of the resources there, which is a pretty cool h He definitely, I mean, he had tons of money to work with, but he definitely put his money where his mouth was in terms of saying like, yes, I want people of all levels of society to have educational materials, and then he made it happen. Yeah, it was not just lip service, which I have to respect. So that is a little bit more on the boatload of knowledge, which just charmed me based just on that nickname. But also there are a lot of really important and interesting people. There's even more and more and more. You can get very in the weeds on the boatload of Knowledge. Oh yeah, all of the work that those people did. You could do an entire podcast series called Boatload of Knowledge and talk about each person and all of their research projects. And if somebody does it, I will listen. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Last Saturday's Classic mentioned the Boatload of Knowledge that was brought to New Harmony, Indiana to create its educational system, so we thought, why not go ahead and run our episode on that as a classic too. This one originally came out on August fifth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So if you listened to our recent episode on the New Harmony utopian societies, you may recall that we referenced a group of scientists and educators that were recruited for the second of those communities that was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge. And I have not been able to stop thinking about the Boatload of Knowledge, so much so that even though I've actually been working on research and writing for a completely different topic that I was planning to have us talk about this week, I moved over to reading about the boatloaders, and then I was like, uh, oh, so now it's just an episode about the boatload I'll get back to that other one and I'll have a head start on it. But I just you know, sometimes the brain obsesses over a thing. So for basic framing, just in case you did not listen to the live show that I just referenced. When Robert Owen founded his Owenite community in New Harmony in eighteen twenty five, and that was in Indiana, he wanted to have the best minds that he could find running the education system there, and for that he recruited William McClure, who also gave a substantial financial contribution to the community and also in turn brought many great minds with him, and the boat that brought them to the community was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge. We'll talk about how I got that nickname, and it's journey to New Harmony with pretty fascinating. So today we're kind of tying about things and maybe an odd order. We're going to talk about the boat load itself and its journey, and then we'll start talking about individual people, including getting into a little bit of detail on McClure, and we'll name a few of the other intellectuals that were involved in this trip and in this project, although they won't get as much detail. And then finally we're going to talk a little bit about how the school that they designed worked and what the group's legacy was. So the keelboat that carried all these luminarias of Intellect left from the harbor at Pittsburgh at two pm on December eighteen twenty five. There were just over forty people aboard, and that included a crew of eleven and the conveyance the Philanthropists that was with a T not a thch was eighty five feet long that's about twenty six meters by fourteen feet wide that's four point two meters, and the group was supposed to travel by steamer, but the Ohio River was too low at the time for a steamer to make the trip. The Philanthropist had four sections. The front area was for the crew, the next was for the men, the third was for the women, and the fourth was for the children. And they were all kind of set up like dormitory style, with like group living. This was definitely a downgrade from the original plan, and a lot of the passengers were pretty dismayed by these arrangements. Robert Dale Owen, the son of the Robert Owen who had catalyzed this whole project, wrote that quote, some of the ladies of our party appear already quite impatient and dissatisfied, the more so since they almost cannot do anything for themselves. He was worried that there would be an uprising, that the passengers would force the boat to turn around and go back to Philadelphia. Some were driven to the breaking point and they just cried openly. And this might sound really, really silly, but I want you to keep in mind that these people were expecting to participate in a well funded utopian experiment, and already at this point their first interaction with the project was well below expectations based on what they had been told that they could anticipate, So this probably shook their confidence in the whole thing. They were moving away from their homes to this new community, and it was from the onset completely not what they had been told to expect. But once everyone got used to these alternate, sort of last minute arrangements on the keel boat, which were going to be their home for a month and a half that it took to make the journeyal that they didn't know it would be quite that long. They did settle in, and by most reports, they even managed to have quite a bit of fun. Just a few days into the trip, though the philanthropist ran aground. That happened just sixteen miles down the Ohio. They could not get the boat free. And coincidentally, this happened just seven miles away from Economy, Pennsylvania, and that was the new town that had been established by the Rapite community that had built New Harmony. Initially, McClure, owen Son and the two other men made the track on land to ask if the rat Bites could help them. Six men were sent out from Economy. They managed to get the boat free. And what's even funnier is that in Robert Dale Owen's assessment of these rescuers, he didn't find them to be particularly smart or engaging, which is odd given their great success at the very type of endeavor that he and his father were trying to do, although they were also achieving commercial success. Yeah, he was like, oh, they were kind of stupid and not very entertaining, But I just I want to this is another time where I want the time travel machine so I can go back and shake him and go dude. They built a successful communal living experiment, they just moved on to another PLACESE. You haven't proven yourself yet, Champion, maybe don't be so judgy. So the day after the keel boat was shifted into a better position, the passengers visited Economy. They had been invited to spend the day there at the invitation of Rapite leader George Rapp, and they seem to have had a really lovely time. This was the last time that Robert Owen, the one who started this whole new community, spent with the boat passengers. He left from Economy to travel to Pittsburgh on business. He had some final arrangements to make in terms of the legalities of taking over the land, and he left the science and educators, along with his son Robert Dale, on their own for the rest of the journey. They didn't get very far though. As they reached the station called Safe Harbor, which was just about eight miles from where they had run aground, they got iced in. The philanthropists stayed there, stuck on ice for four full weeks. The group didn't extricate the boat until January ninth, which was twenty eight days after they had been first iced in, and during that time there had been just a number of misfortunes, including people who fell through the ice but survived. One passenger who fell and hit his head on a log while out hunting, which caused a delirium and fever. He eventually did recover, though there were also a number of people who opted to leave the boat and shelter elsewhere or travel over land before ultimately regrouping with everyone else. Yeah. I when I was first researching this and they were saying, like, some people just left the boat, I was like, uh oh, but they all managed to hook back up with everybody. They didn't just wander out into the snowy wilderness and perish or meets some bad end. This whole thing comes off as kind of comical because this is a boat full of smart people that keeps running into problems, But it's more of an indication of how difficult travel was. I feel like it was like the the micro cosm version of how their entire commune played out, because it just wasn't planned as well as it should have been, right, and they didn't know enough about traveling by boat down a river, yeah, to know. Like there are some of their writings where they're like, we don't know if the captain is bad at his job or if it's just really bad situations, And it's like they just had no idea what they were doing well, and it's just the wrong time to be taking a steamer down a river that freezes over well, and they didn't even have a steamer. They're in a keelboat. Like okay, a steamer may have wiggled through, but the keelboat was like no, ma'am. While they were ice bound, though, some passengers sketched and played games, and they explored the river banks, they had assessed their situation and agreed that to make everything work, they were just going to eat two meals a day, both to stretch their supplies and to prevent someone from having to take on the load of making three meals a day. While they were in this odd situation, they also organized themselves to be able to relieve eight of the crew members on a rotating schedule. They traveled by land eight miles south to the town of Beaver from time to time to get some supplies and socialize. On one of these occasions, Robert Dale Owen got into a discussion with a Methodist minister, who, he wrote quote reasoned with quite good temper and some talent, but has the most incorrect ideas. Robert Dale Owen, like his father believed that religion was more of a problem than a source of good. Yeah, the Owenites whole thing was that religion was useless and that you just needed to raise people right to make a better world with good education. But yeah, it's sort of one of those every time I'm reading anything that Robert Dale Owen writes, just like he talked about the Rappites being like not very smart or interesting, I'm like, you are not. You seem like a person whose intentions are good and makes a lot of foolish judge hits. The group also incidentally took on several additional passengers just a few days before they were able to move on from the ice, and when the ice started to break, the sound of it scared them all so much that they were convinced that the boat was sinking again, kind of evidence that they maybe weren't fully prepared for this trip. But after they evacuated and carted all of their trunks and luggage ashore, they realized things that were okay and even good because that meant the ice was breaking up, and then they had to haul everything back onto the boat and make preparations to get underway. To that end, they also cut a pathway in the remaining ice to get the keel boat moving, and they were soon once again headed to their new utopia. They made a stop that first evening in Steubenville, Ohio, and took on another passenger, which was the son of Judge Benjamin Tappan, who wanted to have his child educated in New Harmony. They stopped in other towns along the way, most notably Cincinnati, where several of the boat loaders toured the Museum of Natural History. When they got to Louisville, Kentucky, they once again grew in numbers as Joseph Neefe, who was an educational reformer, joined up with them along with his wife, and after Louisville, the Philanthropists made its way to Mount Vernon, Indiana, and there they made land to start the final leg of the journey. So most of them at that point traveled the final fifteen miles to New Harmony by wagon, arriving on January twenty third, and at that point they had been in transit for forty seven days. A small handful of them, however, remained on the keel boat and they traveled farther south on the Ohio before linking up with the Wabash River and turning north into it to make their way to New Harmony. So the origin for the nickname Boatload of Knowledge came from a speech by Robert Owen. While the keel boat that the scientists and educators were on made its way down the Ohio River, Owen had traveled ahead by land, and he started telling the New Harmony residents who were setting up their new utopia about McClure's really fantastic group. He gave a speech to this new community in which he commented on the vast amount of knowledge that was contained in this one boat continuing quote, not Latin and Greek and other languages, but real substantial knowledge. From that point, people started calling the philanthropist the boatload of Knowledge. I love that nickname so much. Owen had called the educators aboard quote, some of the ablest instructors of use that could be found in the US or perhaps the world, And all of that knowledge and ability had been gathered by a man named William McClure, who is often called Owen's partner in his utopian enterprise. We'll get into McClure's life after we pause for a quick sponsor break William McClure was born on October twenty seventh, seventeen sixty three in Ayr, Scotland. His father was a merchant and was successful enough that William got a private education. William first traveled to the US at the age of nineteen, and after a brief stay, he went to London, where he started a job with Miller Hart and Company, an American commerce firm, and while working there he was constantly traveling, mostly to France and Ireland, but also on occasion to the US. In seventeen ninety six, McClure moved to the United States, permanently settling in Philadelphia. He also became a US citizen. He was already wealthy, but he quickly started adding to his fortune with business interests in Pennsylvania and Virginia. By eighteen hundred, he was able to leave work behind and focus on his other interests, which were science and education reform, full time, and he felt that the way that education had been managed up to that point was catastrophic, writing quote, I had been long in the habit of considering education one of the greatest abuses our species were guilty of, and of course one of the reforms most beneficial to humanity. He saw that society was generally separated in categories of non productive and productive classes, governors and the governed, and that the only real thing that kept the system in place was the education that the upper classes were receiving. So he wanted to buck against that age's old arrangement and offer equal knowledge to rich and poor. He believed that once someone was armed with knowledge, they could rise up, so the lower classes, if they had education, could meet the upper class in equality. He also saw that the young Republic of the United States needed an educated populace if it was going to survive. He wrote quote power being in the hands of the people through the medium of popular governments renders a diffusion of knowledge necess to the support of freedom. He looked to the work of Swiss education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestilazzi, who had built a curriculum plan based on the ideas in Jean Jacqesrusseau's Emil, which examined the individual in society and the relationship between the two. McClure visited Pestilazzi's school several times to observe and it was that model that he sought to emulate when he planned out New Harmony's education system. McClure had tried to convince Pestilazzi to move to the US, and even offered to bankroll a new school for him, but Pestilazzi turned that offered down. And even as McClure was studying and promoting the latest ideas in education reform, he was also engaged in his own scientific work, specifically in geology. In eighteen oh nine, he offered up a geological map of the United States to the American Philosophical Society during a lecture, and this is considered to be a breakthrough moment in geology. He had put together data that no one else had assembled, and as his fame for his scientific work grew, McClure started to spend his time bouncing from geological tours and surveys to meeting with education experts and setting up schools. Because he made a name for himself in the geological sciences, when the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was formed in eighteen twelve, McClure was invited to become a member. In eighteen seventeen, he became the organization's president, which was a post he would hold for more than two decades right up till the end of his life, and it was the connections that he made through that organization that really enabled him to assemble an academic dream team for New Harmony. There was an Owenite society in Philadelphia by eighteen twenty three, a year before Robert Owen bought New Harmony. He made that purchase at the end of eighteen twenty four, and members of the Academy of Natural Sciences had read Owen's essays on communal living as early as the eighteen teens and they were pretty enthralled by his ideas because it was exciting and new, and some, including McClure, had even visited Owen's community in New Lanark, Scotland, where Owen had focused on improving the conditions for the poor working class that kept his textile mills running. And eventually it was McClure that Robert Owen entrusted to design and establish the education system and bo New Harmony Indiana. One of the people that McClure worked with closely to get New Harmony's children educated was Maria ducros Fletagiaux, and she was born in France in seventeen eighty three and had married Joseph Fletageaux as a young woman, although the exact date of their marriage is unknown. The couple had a child named Achilles, a son, but they lived separately, so her husband Joseph does not seem to have factored very prominently in her life at all. Marie's first contact with William McClure took place in eighteen nineteen when he was visiting Paris. Fretijeaux moved from Paris to Philadelphia in eighteen twenty one to set up a Pestiluzian school. She helped spread Owen's ideas when she came to North America. She brought some essays that had been published in Europe and started circulating that and discussing it with other members of the Philadelphia science and education communities. Yeah, in a lot of ways, she really seeded some of these ideas that Owens had had by just she was very charming and people really took a shine to her generally, and so when she was like, I have this exciting essay that I want you to read, people read it. It appears that it was actually Freda Joe that convinced McClure that he should partner with Owen. Although McClure had written to her after he first visited New Lanark and he spoke of his time there as the most pleasant of his life, it was her urging that really amplified his interest in his desire to invest in the New Harmony project and to recruit like minded intellectuals to their cause. She met Robert Owen in November of eighteen twenty four when he visited Philadelphia and specifically her school. She later wrote McClure that she and Owen had immediately hit it off. They were like old friends from the moment they met. Owen told her that if they worked on their education ideas in a place where the various obstacles to those ideas could be removed, a community like the one he was planning, they could truly see what a proper education could do for a child's development. He went on to make the case to Fretajou that she could keep working at her school in Philadelphia for decades, but she would never really get to see just how impactful her work could be there. But if she came to New Harmony, things would be different because she could work without societal ills of a large city, ruining and countering her efforts. Coming up will do a quick rundown a few of the other people who put so much work into setting up the education system in New Harmony. But first we'll have a quick sponsor break. While Marie Fretajeaux was a cornerstone of the education system in New Harmony and one of the most important members after Robert Owen and William McClure, there were, of course plenty of others that came on that boatload of knowledge, and here are but a few of them. Thomas Say was born on June twenty seventh, seventeen eighty seven. He was an entomologist and a concologist, and someone who McClure had befriended early on in his time at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Say was the librarian there. McClure had funded some of Say's scientific research trips and then asked Say to accompany him on several of his geological surveys. Say is often called the father of American descriptive entomology. If you google him you can find lots of stuff from his entomology work. Yeah, and just in case you don't know what a concologist is. It's someone who studies mollusk shells, and he had expertise in this field. He was one of the leaders in that area. So when the boatload of knowledge was trapped in the ice and the passengers started covering shifts to relieve the crew, it was Say that everyone elected as captain, and he was apparently really pretty good at managing the crew. In eighteen twenty seven, Say married one of the students that Marie Fretegieaux had brought with her on the trip. Once the school system of New Harmony was established, it to say that McClure entrusted with it whenever he was away from the village. Later on, when the utopian experiment had ended, Say stayed at New Harmony. He used that as his primary location from which he conducted his research, and he wrote for the rest of his life that life, unfortunately was pretty short. He died in eighteen thirty four. French naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesieur born in seventeen seventy eight was another friend from the Academy of Natural Sciences and in his work in paleontology, archaeology, ixeology, and general zoology. Lesieur made numerous discoveries of new species while he traveled the world, particularly Australia, and he served as curator at the Academy. Like Marie Fretejeaux, Lesur had been into Owen's idea of a utopian society even before McClure, and was eager when the chance came along to be part of New Harmony. During the boat ride down the Ohio River, he drew one hundred and twenty seven sketches of the landscapes that they traveled through. Yeah, those are, you know, kind of the visual record of that entire trip, and they're really interesting. He was a really, really talented artist, and while Robert Owen, who founded the second Utopia New Harmony, left feeling as though McClure's curriculum had been part of its demise, he recognized Lysier's art skills so much that he still sent one of his sons, Richard, back to New Harmony to study with Lysier. In eighteen twenty eight, after Thomas Say died, Lasour returned to France and he went on to become the curator at the Muse Distois Natuelle d Have. Although he served in that prestigious position for less than a year before he also died in December of eighteen forty six. Williams. Fiquipal d'arrousement was like Fretagioux, an educator, and when he traveled in New Harmony, he actually brought ten students with him. They were boys from a school that he taught at in Philadelphia. That school had been established by William McClure, and before working there, Fiquipal had worked in schools in France which had also been funded and established by McClure. Fiquipal was the person, incidentally, who had hit his head on a log during that ic in on the river and seemed to be in pretty bad shape for a while. Two of his students were the first to fall through the ice as well, so that month they were stuck there. Was just not particularly kind to him. Yeah. He also kind of had a reputation for being a little bit of a grouchil Epithecus. There were some people that claimed that he never fully recovered and that was why he was so grumpy. Once the system at New Harmony was in place, Fickopaul taught, among other things, printing. He left the school in eighteen thirty and in eighteen thirty one, he married social reformer France's Right. That marriage ended in divorce in eighteen fifty. So that's just a sampling of these educators and to kind of move on to the curriculum and the legacy of these schools. Though Owen's New Harmony experiment ended just two years after it began, as we mentioned in our previous episode on the subject, the educators stayed around. They kept the school system going. They also started publishing a regular journal called The Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, which continued publication until they eighteen forties. Yeah, they really felt like they had built something worthwhile and they weren't willing to just abandon it just because the utopian society wasn't going to work out, and they had people that wanted to send their children there. The curriculum for New Harmony children started when they were still toddlers. So children enrolled in the first school, called the Infant School at the age of two, and at that point it's obviously just about play, and the educators were kind of noting the development of the children, and children stayed in Infant School until they were five years old. At age five, children moved into the Higher School. They also boarded away from their families in a large dormitory. This was intended to keep the educational plan free from parental influence and also to introduce the children to the idea of communal living from a very early age. The Higher School educated children until they were twelve and included trades training in workshops and textile mills so that they were contributing to the good of society from early on. Their academic work included courses in mathematics, mechanics, art, music, language, science, and writing, with jim nastics for physical exercise. Throughout the lessons of the Higher School, all the scientists that had been recruited gave lectures. Yeah, it was basically like having teachers who were the Krem de la Crem and all of their fields come and give talks periodically. That aspect of it is really unique and quite special. After completing the Higher School, students would move on to the School of Industry, and that's where real trade instruction took place, and there students learned a great deal more than that early training that they had gotten in the Higher School. So this training did separate pretty solidly though along gender line. So the boys learned everything from taxidermy to blacksmithing, and the girls were taught dressmaking, millinery, cooking, and other domestic skills. The School of Industry also ran its own printing press. That was part of why Fukuopaul was teaching how to run the press and students were taught to run it so that the scholars of the town could have their own publishing mechanism for their research, which I have to say is a pretty ingenious setup. Although McClure's educational system shuddered after his death, the programs that he and his colleagues instituted were precursors to the public school system and paved the way for it, even though it would be decades before such a system was actually in place in Indiana. That effort was helped along in eighteen fifty one by Robert Dale Owen, who became very active in government and public affairs. That year he helped get language providing for a tax supported, free public education system written into Indiana's Second Constitution. And the scholars and scientists of New Harmony had assembled a library that was worthy of any university's envy. They had brought their book collections with them as they traveled and all kind of merged those together into one library and their collections of specimens in their museum that they set up drew researchers from around the world who wanted to observe them, as well as meet with the scientists there to discuss their ideas and kind of use them as like a sounding board for things that they were working on. In eighteen twenty eight, year after Owen's New Harmony experiment was dissolved, William McClure left as well. He headed to Mexico. Over the next five years, he and Marie Fretajeaux exchanged almost five hundred letters in which it became clear that the French teacher had fallen really in love with the geologist. That didn't appear that McClure returned her romantic interests, though, but the two of them did remain close. Fretejoue traveled to Mexico to visit McLure in eighteen thirty three and died not long after arriving. McClure stayed in Mexico until the end of his life in eighteen forty. Throughout all this time in New Harmony in Mexico, he had remained president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is one of those things. McClure constantly on the road from the time he was young, so he might have just been good at managing affairs he was not physically involved in, but he had, you know, kept things going at the school even though he was in another country. He was, you know, giving his input on curriculum. He was kind of keeping it running in a lot of ways, and financially he was still willing to put a lot of backing into it. When he died, McLure left behind two different educational funds. One was part of the Academy of Sciences and that was clearly described as funding that should go to making sure educational materials went into the hands of laborers. The other had the same goal, but it was a general provision in his will that offered five hundred dollars to any laborer's group that established a lecture and reading room with at least one hundred books in it. There were one hundred and sixty libraries that were funded as a result of this provision. That practice of making knowledge accessible for everyone was something that McClure had put into practice himself. Throughout his life, but one of the most enduring examples of it is the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute, which he founded in eighteen thirty eight, which was two years before he died. The institute moved from its original location in the church at New Harmony to a new building in eighteen ninety four and it remains in operation to this day. Now it's the oldest continuously operating public library in Indiana. Yeah, it's also a museum. And even though it is called the Workingmen's instat it was always intended to be something that not just men could access, but their entire families would have access to any of the resources there, which is a pretty cool h He definitely, I mean, he had tons of money to work with, but he definitely put his money where his mouth was in terms of saying like, yes, I want people of all levels of society to have educational materials, and then he made it happen. Yeah, it was not just lip service, which I have to respect. So that is a little bit more on the boatload of knowledge, which just charmed me based just on that nickname. But also there are a lot of really important and interesting people. There's even more and more and more. You can get very in the weeds on the boatload of Knowledge. Oh yeah, all of the work that those people did. You could do an entire podcast series called Boatload of Knowledge and talk about each person and all of their research projects. And if somebody does it, I will listen. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.